Canada
Founded by French adventurers on Algonkian-speaking territory, Canada has been trying to eradicate First Nations' languages from Day One. Two centuries later, English Canadians squandered Canada's political and economic viability failing to do the same to French Canadians. In 1968, having blown 400 years on the unilingual pipe dream, Ottawa recognised French Canadians' right to exist. Canada started the arduous process of repairing centuries of destruction. It's turning out to be hard. Time will tell if twenty generations of resentment and mistrust can be reversed before the Confederation disintegrates. Nevertheless, as the only North American nation to reject the national-language come-on, Canada gets a (half-millenium overdue) A for effort.
The United States
Most anglophone Americans believe their society is and has always been unilingual. Nothing could be further from the truth. English-only America has never existed anywhere but Hollywood. Famous for touting diversity and persecuting nonconformists simultaneously, Americans today are flirting with Cro-Magnon language legislation. Their lack of perception can be startling. I recently lectured an American audience on Canada's constitutional crisis. Afterward, a woman proudly declared, "That's why I belong to English Only. I don't want that to happen here." Apparently she'd slept through my entire presentation. As I had just spent an hour explaining, "English-Only" schemes created Canada's problems.
Facilitating communication has little to do with unilingualism campaigns anywhere. In this case, Americans are stroking their nebulous malaise by chasing imaginary "invaders." As civil-rights supporters became "Communists" in the '50s, so Spanish-speaking Americans are suddenly counted "foreign." Some are arrested by the INS in vast Hispanophone roundups and forcibly "repatriated" to Mexico. Communities around the country, including the state of California, have enacted English-only laws intended at best to insult non-Anglophones. Baser elements wish to exclude them from public life completely.
America's uncivil language war damages its culture, its economy, and its world standing. How much, is a question historians can answer.
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